*Twilight'*s Blood Sisters

Swept into a world of menacing vampires and shape-shifting werewolves, a coven of young actresses are riding the Twilight saga's record-breaking movie madness. As the third installment, Eclipse, hits theaters, its girl “supernaturals”—including Dakota Fanning, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Ashley Greene—give Nancy Jo Sales the inside scoop on the set (part family, part high-school cafeteria, part boot camp), plus their take on the appeal of Robert Pattinson's Edward and why they're as “Twihard” as their fans.

There's a photo shoot today at Milk Studios in Los Angeles, and the subjects are beautiful young women who play monsters. They're the girl “supernaturals” of the Twilight film series, now a billion-dollar worldwide franchise whose third installment, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, opens this month.

The first to arrive at this giant white studio space is Dakota Fanning. Sixteen, willowy and blonde, she's dressed in black leggings and a flowing tea-green top which highlights her haunting blue eyes. In the second Twilight movie, New Moon (2009), and in Eclipse, Fanning plays Jane, a member of the Volturi, a super-scary, cape-wearing coven of vampires.

“They're like the police, the royalty, the lawmakers,” the actress explains, leaning back in a leather armchair, waiting to have her hair and makeup done. “Jane's power is, by looking at someone she inflicts pain on them.”

“Do you ever try to practice that on someone who's annoying you, like a bad waiter?,” I ask her.

“I wish,” she says, laughing. “We all have those moments. It doesn't work on Bella, though. Her mind is too strong.”

Bella Swan—for anyone who has somehow avoided knowing the intimate details of the ghoulish global phenomenon that is Twilight—is the series's main character, a typical teenage girl (angstily played by Kristen Stewart) in drizzly Forks, Washington, who falls in love with a mysterious, pale-skinned young man who happens to be a vampire (the gorgeous Rob Pattinson). Jane is out to get Bella, but offscreen, Fanning says, she and Stewart are friends. “In The Runaways”—this year's rock biopic in which Fanning was Cherie Currie to Stewart's Joan Jett—“we played best friends, and we're really great friends in real life.”

And so, she says, she felt only a twinge of regret that she didn't get to be Bella. “The parts are very specific,” says Fanning, “and by the first one”—Twilight (2008)—“the main roles were already cast, and so it was great that I was able to be a little part of it.” The role of Jane is a rather small one for an actress of her standing. Although still in high school (where she's a cheerleader) in L.A., she has already appeared in nearly 30 films (The Secret Life of Bees, I Am Sam) and earned a reputation for being a significant talent.

But Fanning wanted to do Twilight, she says, because—like legions of other girls her age—she was a fan. “I'd read the books and seen the first film,” she says, “and definitely I was a fan, and I was honored that I got asked to be a part of this whole phenomenon.”

“She's so thrilled to be a part of this,” says her mother, Joy, a willowy brunette with a lilting Georgia accent, who's come along to chaperone. “It's so much fun for her. It defines their generation—like Star Wars defined ours.”

About an hour later, a rock soundtrack is playing, the set and lighting crews are making last-minute preparations, and the actresses are getting manicured, powdered, and curled. Nikki Reed, whose 40s-style hair and makeup is already done, is sitting at the lunch table, musing over what makes Twilight so popular among girls.

Reed, who plays Rosalie, the vampire sister of Edward Cullen (Pattinson's character), is wearing khaki short-shorts which show off her firm, tan legs. She picks at a bean salad.

“I think Edward represents the modern-day perfect man in that he's very sexy, very dangerous,” she says, “but there's also something very unattainable about him.” Like, for instance, he's a vampire. “Bella and Edward's love is very taboo and forbidden,” says Reed, “and I think that kind of represents all youthful relationships, because that's what all first loves feel like. This isn't like a healthy love, Edward and Bella's love—it's sort of borderline, like, insane.”

Reed knows something about outrageous teenage behavior. In 2003, when she was 15, she shot to fame for co-writing the controversial and critically acclaimed Thirteen with director Catherine Hardwicke, her father's ex-girlfriend (who went on to direct the first Twilight movie). Reed co-starred in Thirteen, about under-age girls running amok, winning an Independent Spirit Award for best debut performance.

Now she's a Twilight veteran, having appeared in all three of the films. Although her character, Rosalie—who disapproves of Edward and Bella's relationship (“She's not, like, catty and bitchy about it,” says Reed, “she just doesn't think it makes sense”)—is a secondary one, she too has her obsessive fans and fan clubs. “I don't think I've ever met anyone who's come up to me and said, ‘Oh, yeah, I like the books,’ ” she says. “It's like, they love the books, and anyone who's a fan of the series is, like, a die-hard fan.” They're known as “Twihards.”

“It's a really bizarre experience shooting these movies,” says Reed. “It's become really crazy, shooting in this isolated place. Not that Vancouver's an isolated place, but we feel very isolated, because a lot of fans move there”—from different states and even countries, relocating to be near the shoot—“and we're always being shuttled in these buses and everything is always so top-secret and we're going underground everywhere. It's like we're living in the dark all the time.”

'I think back on when we were in Portland, doing the first film, where no one cared,” says Elizabeth Reaser, who plays Esme Cullen, loving mother to the Cullen vampire clan. “We were running around Portland getting into all sorts of trouble, all hanging out as a group in people's hotel rooms. So innocent.” She smiles.

Reaser, 35, is sitting in a makeup chair, her hair in rollers, wearing jeans, a white sleeveless shirt, and blood-red cowboy boots she says she was “talked into” by a saleswoman at Barneys, “and now I never take them off.”

A graduate of Juilliard, she had done mainly small roles on TV (The Sopranos, Grey's Anatomy) when she was cast as Esme and became part of the Twilight juggernaut. “Overnight,” she says, “a completely different sort of lifestyle emerged—for some people in the cast more than others, obviously.” The real-life romance between Stewart and Pattinson only added heat to the attention the Twilight films were getting. The actor-paramours were suddenly cultural rock stars.

“I think there's also something about the Cullens that is very appealing to people,” says Reaser. “They're a chosen family, a modern, blended family, and they're very powerful and very interesting.

“I'm very excited to see this new movie,” she says, “because it's completely different from the previous two. It's more of an action movie. I'd never done any action—I never wanted to do any action. And then I became very interested in all this training and choreography we had to do. We have a vampire battle. It's like, Don't piss off someone's mother. We have a battle with these out-of-control newborn vampires”—an army of them assembled by the evil Victoria, Bella's nemesis, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. “They're trying to take us down, and it's, Don't mess with my family.” She laughs.

The cast of Twilight—which has been together a total of almost nine months over the last three years—also functions like a family, according to Reaser. “It's like any family in that we have moments where we love each other, and we have moments where we irritate each other,” she says. It's a family populated by a lot of impossibly attractive young guys—not just Pattinson, but also Taylor Lautner, who plays the shape-shifting werewolf Jacob (Bella's other love), and Xavier Samuel, who in Eclipse plays the newborn vampire Riley.

“Oh, it gets so old, you have no idea,” says Reaser. “It has no effect on me. They're all gorgeous and lovely boys. But, like, I was on Grey's Anatomy—I was surrounded by hot dudes. You just want someone interesting and weird at a certain point. I have a massive crush on Larry David. I've seen every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm like a hundred times.”

“Well, maybe if I put it out there you'll get a phone call,” I tell her.

She laughs a big laugh. “Fantastic.”

Twilight, the book—written by Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon and mother of three living in suburban Cave Creek, Arizona—was published in 2005 and optioned by Paramount. When the option lapsed two years later, it was picked up by Summit Entertainment, which hired Melissa Rosenberg to write the screenplay (she has written all three films). Wyck Godfrey, the series's producer, says, “It's been a complete explosion. For Summit, it has become the cornerstone of their studio—it helped put them on the map.”

The vampire movies have set multiple box-office records: at nearly $70 million, Twilight had the second-biggest opening day for any non-sequel after Spider-Man. New Moon, directed by Chris Weitz, had the largest single-day gross of all time at close to $73 million. (Eclipse was directed by David Slade, who also directed 30 Days of Night, another vampire movie.)

“The movies have generated new readers for the books, and vice versa,” says Godfrey. The series of four books—the fourth is titled Breaking Dawn—have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. So lucrative has the franchise become, the studio is rumored to be contemplating turning Breaking Dawn into a two-part film.

“You'd think after the second movie, it would simmer down,” says Rob Friedman, Summit's co-chairman and C.E.O. “But it continues to grow.” He credits the phenomenon to the close attention the studio pays to the fans, engaging them through events, online discussions, and fan conventions like Comic-Con. “We've been very cognizant of the fans and the fan involvement,” Friedman says. “There's no one closer to the fans than Stephenie [Meyer], and she is very, very involved in the movies. In a way, we're fans ourselves. I would say that I'm a Twihard.”

Having such a strong, even obsessive fan base has been “intimidating,” says Bryce Dallas Howard, who in Eclipse plays the menacing Victoria. Howard replaces Rachelle Lefevre, who portrayed the character in the first two films, but then lost out on the role due to a scheduling conflict.

“The fans are disappointed” about the change, says Howard, munching fudgy brownies from the lunch table minutes before photographer Norman Jean Roy will begin the shoot. She's wearing a crimson dress and a necklace choked with diamonds and rubies, her red hair in a 40s do. “Rachelle did a great job,” she says, “and I think that needs to be honored. The most critical thing to me was the continuity of a character that was established extraordinarily well.”

Howard, Ron's daughter, who is 29, has appeared in some spooky movies herself—M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and Lady in the Water. According to insiders, she was on the original short list to play Victoria, but at the time her schedule did not permit it. So instead she became a Twihard. “I had seen Twilight innumerable times,” she says. “After I saw it for the fourth time, one of my best guy friends, for my birthday, made me Post-it notes with Robert Pattinson's face that said, ‘Live Dangerously,’ because I was so obsessed. My husband actually said to me, ‘Do I need to be worried about this?’ ”

Howard has been married for four years to Seth Gabel, whom she met and dated while they were students at N.Y.U. He's here now with their three-year-old son, Theo; they're playing with toy cars on the coffee table in the studio's living-room area. “I have a great support system,” she says.

Her support system proved invaluable when she got the call about Eclipse; she was hired to do the film just a few days before shooting began. “We all came together on the same flight,” she says, “and all of us were thrown into fight training. It was several hours a day, five to six days a week, and then we would go from there to the gym and do regular training. I mean, it was very, very challenging. We were jumping over things and ricocheting off walls.”

Like the other actors in the Twilight series, she seems to feel very passionate about her character—despite the fact that Victoria is the series's villain. “What I love so much about Victoria is there's a purpose behind her bloodlust,” Howard says. “It's not just a vampire hunting her food. The stakes are so much higher because her mate, James, was murdered”—by Edward, when James attacked Bella in Twilight—“so this is true vengeance, which is a really fascinating range of emotions to investigate.”

Roy, the photographer, wants the ladies on set. They lie down on a riser, their red dresses flowing around them like blood. The song “Tainted Love” is playing.

After the shoot is over, Howard, Reed, and the lovely Native American actress Julia Jones—who in Eclipse plays a new character, Leah Clearwater—are relaxing on a couch, winding down.

“I told my friend I was doing something with you guys today,” Jones says, “and she was like, ‘You guys are, like, the three most emotionally unstable characters in the whole series.’ ”

“Because she knows what she wants,” Jones says. “I think one of the tragedies of Rosalie is she's really misunderstood. My character is really similar to hers, actually.”

Jones, 29, had appeared in a handful of independent films when she was cast as Leah, the only female among the wolf pack. “The wolves are the natural enemies of the vampires,” she explains, “but in Eclipse, they join forces with them to fight the newborns.”

The social division between the groups of monsters was apparently echoed in the interaction of the actors on set. “It's just like high school,” says Reed, “in that the wolves really don't hang out with the vampires.”

They laugh. “We have different schedules,” offers Howard.

“We can't hang out with them,” says Reed, “because we have 5,000 pounds of white makeup on and Taylor [Lautner] just wants to tackle you on the floor and throw you up in the air, and I'm like, ‘I can't play football with you, Taylor—I can't break a sweat. I can't move, actually, 'cause my wig might come flying off.’ ”

“He just turned 18,” says Howard, smiling.

“It's so scary,” Jones says, “the way he does handstands on top of the makeup chairs! I walk into this room, and there's like three wolves upside down doing handstands on the armrests of these chairs. That's the thing about the wolves—”

“I love the way the wolves are always doing physical contests and the vampires are being, like, edgy and writing music,” says Howard.

“That's the yin and yang of our movie,” says Reed. “The wolves are a bunch of cubs. They run around and wrestle and punch each other. When do you see us [vampires] touch each other? We're cold.”

I ask if these characters ever get into their heads.

“Bryce could talk to you for days about that,” teases Reed.

“It's the magic of movies,” says Howard. “There's this special, creative time when you're doing any movie where you take on the qualities of your character. I think all of us were going through a physically empowered time when doing this movie. They have you climbing up trees and running ridiculously fast on treadmills”—to create the effect of the vampires' supernatural swiftness—“so you feel this total ego-boosting rush of thinking you are far more powerful than you actually are.”

“I go hiking in the canyons,” says Jones, “and I try to do it before the end of the day, but I have caught myself when it's almost dark and I should not be there by myself. Once I was running, thinking, But I'm a faster runner than anybody! It's totally unrealistic, but it's like, Leah Clearwater is the fastest.”

Later, on the telephone, I catch up with Ashley Greene, who plays Edward Cullen's vampire sister Alice. She's in Shreveport, Louisiana, filming Butter, a comedy about a family of butter carvers starring Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Garner—“I play the rebel who doesn't understand the whole appeal of it,” Greene says.

I ask her what being part of the Twilight series has meant to her. “Everything,” she says frankly. “The franchise is the whole reason I have this film right now. It's given me this incredible springboard to dive into my career. I would still be working as a hostess at a restaurant to support myself.” Prior to being cast as Alice, Greene had had a few small parts on TV. “Twilight is not just a job,” she says. “We have these die-hard fans who care about us in this incredible way. Hollywood can be a harsh reality, a harsh industry, and to have these fans behind me just makes all the difference.”

Alice's power is that she is psychic, and so I ask Greene if she has had any premonitions about how Eclipse will do compared with the other two Twilight films. “You don't have to be psychic to know how this movie's going to do,” she says. “Obviously, it's going to be a hit.”